System Tuneup Guide

PC Disaster #2, Hard-Drive failures

Your hard drive is one of the hardest working components in your PC next to your cooling fans, and will eventually fail over time. It is always better to be prepared to deal with Hard Drive failures ahead of time…and be ready to anticipate the failure rather than dealing with it after the fact. The easiest thing to do is to make regular backups of your hard drive. One software program that will ‘clone’ your drive for you is the Acronis True Image program (www.acronis.com), which costs around $80.

Backups should done in conjunction with a program that can monitor the health of your hard drive at an given time, and sound an alarm if something starts going wrong. Personal SmartCheck (www.urltoy.com) is a great program for monitoring your hard drive’s health. And it can be downloaded for a 30-day free trial before you have to spend the $20 to keep it if you like it. SmartCheck will even predict when your hard drive will fail,giving you ample warning to make necessary arrangements for replacement drive to be installed.

Of course, protecting an already working drive is easy, but what should you do if your hard drive has already failed and won’t spin up? Unfortunately, if the drive doesn’t spin up at all, then you won’t be able to recover your data. If your drive barley spins up but windows won’t start, you can use the Recovery Console to fix or restore it, or you could try BART PE Disk (www.nu2.nu) to try and gain access to windows and your data. Of course the 3rd alternative is to hire an expensive data recovery service to rescue your hard drive data for you, but depending on your data’s value, the recovery costs will be justifiable.

You can physically install a new hard drive easily enough, but you’ll have to reinstall your windows operating system once you do.

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While sometimes you can’t prevent something terrible from happening to your PC, there are many things you CAN do to “Be Prepared”:

Sooner or later, you’ll probably have the wonderful experience of having your PC fail or ‘meltdown’ on you…this has happened to me several times in the past, and I wish I had a photo of the look of unimaginable horror on my face when I realized I couldn’t get my computer to startup and operate normally.

Computer disasters come in all shapes and sizes, from a damaging power surge, to and even more frightening theft of your personal data by someone to create a false identity.

10 Days to become a PC Disaster Response Specialist

That’s right, over the next 10 days we’ll be covering many critical issues on how to successfully restore a a dead PC to life, and we’ll also cover the area of computer security, and how to prevent break-ins and safeguard your data in ways that would make Fort Knox proud!

Are Your Components to Blame?

Many disasters can be caused by your hardware. The good news is it IS possible to revive a dead PC due to hardware failures, simply by identifying and replacing the malfunctioning components. Nothing is worse that typing a report that took you 3 hours to create, only to lose it because of a power outage or computer freeze. We’ll show you the options you have to diagnose and repair irritating errors that can be just as destructive as major hardware failures.

We’ll show you how to recover items or files that you deleted accidentally and want back. Like digital camera photos. We’ll look at how to repair scratched disks and how to use your recovery console to start your PC if it doesn’t boot. We will also show you how to create a recovery CD so you can examine an unbootable hard drive for your valuable data.

PC Security & You

We’ll also cover specific security concerns and what to do if your PC has been hacked or you know that someone else has helped themselves to your data. We’ll show you how to avoid spyware in all its ugly forms, and give you advice that will help you to protect yourself online. Wireless connections pose a major security threat today because most people simply don’t bother to encrypt their connections, which allows others to use your bandwidth without your knowledge.

So sit back and relax as we educate and entertain you these next 10 days…you’ll be better prepared to deal with any computer disaster after we’re done with you!

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Since we’ve been on a Free utilities kick this week, I thought I’d pass along the download link for another useful freebie, the Microsoft Powertoys for Windows XP program….

PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What are they? PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released.

Note: The PowerToy by Microsoft does not currently work with Windows Vista.

Current PowerToy options: Here is a detailed listing of the options currently available with this latest version of PwerToys.

Color Control Panel Applet

Allows you to manage windows colors options all in one place…especially helpful if you are a photographer or web designer trying to keep the true colors from your photos when placed online.

SyncToy

With new sources of files coming from every direction (such as digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops), SyncToy can help you copy, move, and synchronize different directories, a must when working with so many different file formats.

RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer

Are you a serious photographer? Now you can organize and work with digital RAW files in Windows Explorer (much as you can with JPEG images). This tool provides thumbnails, previews, printing, and metadata display for RAW images. RAW images retain the most data possible when a digiatl photo is taken and then saved, this is a really nice feature to have on PowerToys.

ClearType Tuner

This PowerToy lets you use ClearType technology to make it easier to read text on your screen, and installs in the Control Panel for easy access. (self-explanatory)

HTML Slide Show Wizard

This wizard helps you create an HTML slide show of your digital pictures, ready to place on your Web site.

Open Command Window Here

This PowerToy adds an “Open Command Window Here” context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.

Alt-Tab Replacement

With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.

Tweak UI

This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.

Version 2.10 requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2003.

Power Calculator

With this PowerToy you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions.

Image Resizer

This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.

CD Slide Show Generator

With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show. The Generator works downlevel on Windows 9x machines as well.

Virtual Desktop Manager

Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.

Taskbar Magnifier

Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.

Webcam Timershot

This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate.

I’ve been having a blast playing with some of the features of PowerToy since downloading it a while ago, and thought it was a useful enough program (Free) that I’d pass this info along to you as well!

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